People generally agree with the following two statements: first, civility is important in professional relationships, and, second, in times of crisis niceties must sometimes be ignored. The numerous recent debates over civility have upheld this consensus, even if there was no agreement about which principles applied in which situation. When Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen, one side argued that this was a violation of social norms while the other said that Trump administration officials should not expect nice treatment while supporting white nationalism. When Jim Acosta was threatened during a Trump rally, one side claimed this violated important norms about respecting the press while the other side replied that when the press spreads misinformation such norms are inapplicable.
Setting aside the validity of these claims, the question of what to do remains. The argument that in times of crisis civility becomes voluntary depends on the idea that civility is distracting and time-consuming. For example, when patients need emergency medical attention, there is no time to observe all the traffic signals. Yet in the current political climate, perhaps civility would be expeditious and not a hindrance. The heated and apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides, while perhaps justified, is leading more people to refuse to even share their views. The idea of mutual respect among people with different opinions is being ignored. If this is what preserves partisanship, then maybe a return to civility would help us overcome it. This doesn’t mean that you can’t forcefully advocate for your position, but that you should do so with respect. Demonstrate that while you strongly disagree with your interlocutor, you still care what happens to them. While it may not solve anything, it will at least make the process of finding solutions more bearable.
- Bergeton Uffe, “The Overlooked Neglect of ‘Civility/Civilization’ (Wén) in Mencius,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies, 2017.
- Maikko Tolonen, “The Gothic Origin of Modern Civility: Mandeville and the Scots on Courage,” Journal of Scottish Philosophy, March 2014.
- Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, Columbia University Press, 2016.
- Yusef Waghid, “On the (Im)potentiality of an African Philosophy of Education to Disrupt Inhumanity,” Educational Philosophy & Theory, October 2015.
- Alex Wellerstein, “The Epistemology of Civility and the Civility of Epistemology,” ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society, March 2017.
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Thank you for this thoughtful post. Its point of view deserves wide and serious attention. For whatever it may be worth, I for one am in full agreement.
Thank you as well for compiling the list of readings. I look forward to reading them and hope many others do as well.
P.S. I shared this on Twitter and Facebook, whose members both could benefit from reading it and the readings!
Thanks for the positive feedback, and for sharing the piece! I agree about Twitter and Facebook–the incivility there is one reason I rarely use either.
You’re welcome. I am curious to see if there are any likes or comments on FB or Twitter–hope so (if positive)
Apologies, but this is just more Father Nathan sermonizing. We should do this, we should do that, we should be nice at all times, we’re bad if we don’t comply, perhaps we should be punished etc.
Imho, this isn’t philosophy, but Catholic moralism. I’m not arguing such moralism is wrong or bad etc, only that it’s not an appropriate focus for professional philosophers.
Philosophy would look more like this:
1) What is respect?
2) Why do we need it, why is it so very important to us? You call me a name, my peace is disturbed, why?
3) What is the most rational and efficient way to solve this problem? Consider the options…
a) Try to manage everyone else on Earth, literally billions of speakers.
b) Try to manage ourselves, the one mind we have the most access to, the mind hearing the words being spoken or written.
Isn’t philosophy supposed to examine evidence from the real world? Has 2,000 years of Catholic finger pointing blame and shame moralizing (option A) succeeded in getting everyone to speak respectfully?
The rational solution is for each of us to take responsibility for our own internal emotional experience.
If someone calls us a name they are trying to disturb our peace. What is the logical reason for us to comply with their agenda?
If someone calls us a name that’s their problem. It’s not rational to make their problem our problem, all that does is further fuel disharmony, making us party to the crime.
Why do we need respect? Write about that please.
Phil,
The ideas in this piece come in part from a recent piece I wrote which will appear on Public Seminar (http://www.publicseminar.org/) soon. I don’t take up the question of respect per se, but I do explore the questions “What is Protest?” and “What Makes Protests Effective?” You might consider reading it if you want a more in-depth analysis.
If you really want to know why we need respect, I’d encourage you to read democratic theorists like Locke, Rousseau, Dewey, Rawls, Habermas, Arendt, etc. All of them talk about how respect is a necessity for healthy democratic dialogue. I can give you some specific passages if you’d like to know more.
As a postscript to the above, here’s a site that should interest those who want to explore Catholic moralism at the academic level.
http://catholicmoraltheology.com/
Nathan writes…
“Demonstrate that while you strongly disagree with your interlocutor, you still care what happens to them. While it may not solve anything, it will at least make the process of finding solutions more bearable.”
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First, what if you don’t actually care what happens to them? As example, this is often the case online where the conversation is happening between strangers, often anonymous strangers. Do we actually really care what happens to every anonymous stranger in the world? Are we saints, is that it?
What I’m asking readers to consider is that what is defined as moral behavior in conversation is often built upon lies. I lie to you, and you lie to me in turn, and then we pat ourselves on the back and tell ourselves what nice people we are. Is lying nice?
The problem with lying (telling someone you care about what happens to them when you don’t care) is that it undermines real communication. Is undermining real communication nice?
If I do say I really care what happens to you, how are you to know that I actually mean it? Maybe I’m just positioning myself as being nice, right? Doesn’t morality lying water down and undermine all the wonderful communication we might like to do also?
There comes a point where it’s my press release talking to your press release and the real you and me are hiding behind these poses. The process is typically so automatic that we don’t even realize we’re doing it.
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Next, what does “making communication bearable” entail? We’re having a conversation, it gets heated, names are called, and we find the process unbearable so we abandon the conversation.
If we set moralism aside, then we are left with nothing to do but inspect what just happened in a detached analytical manner, as if we were diagnosing a broken machine.
I yell at you, you yell back in turn, and we find that unbearable. Why? What’s actually happening? What’s the mechanism that caused the conversation to collapse? You said some words, they entered my mind, and I freak out and run. Why? What am I running from exactly?